Morning Glory

I occasionally read The Triangle Grammar Guide (because I’m just that weird); today I found this article and found out that I’ve been wrong about this for a long time:

Concrete thinking

One of our Home & Garden columnists reminded me recently of the difference between concrete and cement. Cement is the dry powder that is mixed with other things (water, sand, gravel) to make concrete, which is the hardened stuff used for sidewalks and some roads. Cement is only cement as long as it’s dry. Another way to think of it is that cement is to concrete as flour is to bread.

If you are interested [in] a more technical (and rather interesting) explanation, here is one from the WiseGeek.

I always thought that concrete was the generic term and that cement was a brand name, like Kleenex(tm) and Q-tip(tm) .

You learn something new every day.

The American Dialect Society announced last week that the Word of the Year: 2006 was plutoed.  To pluto is to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.

What I found enjoyable was a review of their Word of the Year picks for the past 17 years.  They’ve done an admirable job of picking out which new words were “Most likely to succeed” in becoming part of everyday language - including such now-common words as blog in 2002, snail-mail in 1992, and notebook PC in 1990.  Remember when those were  new words?  Yeah, just barely.  Seems like they’ve been around forever.

This is a week late, but fun nonetheless. If your vocabulary is up to snuff, you should recognize it. Special thanks to MoK at Six Degrees of Blondness.

T’was the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual yuletide celebration, and throughout our place of residence, kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the woodburning caloric apparatus, pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific St. Nicholas.

The prepubescent siblings, comfortably ensconced in their respective accommodations of repose, were experiencing sub-conscious visual hallucinations of variegated fruit confections moving rhythmically through their cerebrums. My conjugal partner and I, attired in our nocturnal head coverings, were about to take slumberous advantage of the hibernal darkness when upon the avenaceous exterior portion of the grounds there ascended such a cacophony of dissonance that I felt compelled to arise with alacrity from my place of repose for the purpose of ascertaining the precise source thereof.

Hastening to the casement, I forthwith opened the barriers sealing this fenestration, noting thereupon that the lunar brilliance without, reflected as it was on the surface of a recent crystalline precipitation, might be said to rival that of the solar meridian itself - thus permitting my incredulous optical sensory organs to behold a miniature airborne runnered conveyance drawn by eight diminutive specimens of the genus Rangifer, piloted by a minuscule, aged chauffeur so ebullient and nimble that it became instantly apparent to me that he was indeed our anticipated caller. With his ungulate motive power traveling at what may possibly have been more vertiginous velocity than patriotic alar predicates, he vociferated loudly, expelling breath musically through contracted labia, and addressed each of the octet by his or her respective cognomen -”Now Dasher, now Dancer…” et al. - guiding them to the uppermost exterior level of our abode, through which structure I could readily distinguish the concatenations of each of the 32 cloven pedal extremities.

As I retracted my cranium from its erstwhile location, and was performing a 180 degree pivot, our distinguished visitant achieved - with utmost celerity and via a downward leap - entry by way of the smoke passage. He was clad entirely in animal pelts soiled by the ebon residue from oxidations of carboniferous fuels which had accumulated on the walls thereof. His resemblance to a street vendor I attributed largely to the plethora of assorted playthings which he bore dorsally in a commodious cloth receptacle.
His orbs were scintillant with reflected luminosity, while his submaxillary dermal indentations gave every evidence of engaging amiability. The capillaries of his malar regions and nasal appurtenance were engorged with blood which suffused the subcutaneous layers, the former approximating the coloration of Albion’s floral emblem, the latter that of the Prunus avium, or sweet cherry. His amusing sub and supra labials resembled nothing so much as a common loop knot, and their ambient hirsute facial adornment appeared like small, tabular and columnar crystals of frozen dihydrogen oxide.

Clenched firmly between his incisors was a smoking piece whose gray fumes, forming a tenuous ellipse about his occiput, were suggestive of a decorative seasonal circlet of holly. His visage was wider than it was high, and when he waxed audibly mirthful, his corpulent abdominal region undulated in the manner of impectinated fruit syrup in a hemispherical container. He was, in short, neither more nor less than an obese, jocund, multi-genarian gnome, the optical perception of whom rendered me risibly frolicsome despite every effort to refrain from so being. By rapidly lowering and then elevating one eyelid and rotating his head slightly to one side, he indicated that trepidation on my part was groundless.

Without utterance and with dispatch, he commenced emptying the aforementioned previously dorsally transported cloth receptacle. Upon completion of this task, he executed an abrupt about face, placed a single manual digit in lateral juxtaposition to his olfactory organ, inclined his cranium forward in a gesture of leave taking and forthwith effected his egress by renegotiating (in reverse) the smoke passage. He then propelled himself in a short vector onto his conveyance, directed a musical expulsion of air through his contracted oral sphincter to the antlered quadrupeds of burden, and proceeded to soar aloft in a movement hitherto observable chiefly among the seed bearing portions of a common weed. But I overheard his vehiculation beyond the limits of visibility: “Ecstatic yuletide to the planetary constituency, and to the selfsame assemblage my sincerest wishes for a salubriously beneficial and gratifyingly pleasurable period between sunset and dawn.”

Notice anything bizarre about the title of this post? Take a good look at it. I’ll wait.

Do you see it?

Every word in the sentence breaks the “I” before “E” except after “C” rule that we all learned in school. Yet, every word is correctly spelled.

My mother taught me that there is more to the mnemonic poem than what I was taught in school. Her version:

“I” before “E” except after “C”

Or when sounded like “A”, as in “neighbor” and “weigh”

Except “seize” and “seizure”, and also “leisure”,

“Weird”, “height” and “neither”, “forfeit” and “either”.

Mom’s version doesn’t even cover the two examples of “I” before “E” even if it IS after “C” that are in the title of this post. Of course, there’s always “oneiromancies“, which breaks the rule twice, once in each direction.

In a comment over at Pharyngula, Oolon Colluphid posted this:

Read the rest of this entry »

A quick quiz to help you brush up:

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

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